I’ve got a weakness for the ‘person from real life enters an RPG world’ genre. It’s a guilty pleasure – some guiltier than others. Delvers LLC fits the mold: two young men from Earth get transported to a fantasy world (in the first sentence, no less!) in which they are given incredible power and a great task by a ‘god’ who clearly feels superior to them and wants nothing more to do with them. Their real power, however, is not their new magic: it’s their ability to use science and think rationally about the world to come up with ways to mirror technology in the world.
The book has some good points: the characters are mostly likeable, and the world is developed with an interesting magic system and cosmology. However, the quality of the writing was hit or miss, and there were several times I considered quitting. Each time, I kept listening, and there was often something that seemed to redeem the book, but each time I found myself wanting to quit again.
The beginning of the book is in media res – I found it shockingly abrupt, in fact. Throughout the book there are scenes like that, where we are told about something rather than seeing it happen. That’s fair – there’s a lot of time passing in the book – but disappointing. Similarly, the climax of the book seems to be a battle that takes place two thirds of the way through the book, leaving hours of writing that lacks tension. It’s realistic, but it’s not dramatic. The main villain of the book is a two-dimensional character who is clearly insane, obsessed with a female character in a way that needed explanation and never got much. His father, on the other hand, is much more complex and hints at bigger and better characters to come. Then there’s the basic premise: that Jason and Henry are just inherently smarter than everyone else on the world, because they think about magic in a way nobody else does: like an RPG. But that falls apart when we learn that many other people on the world come from Earth, and that some of them come from much more advanced societies than our own – and yet nobody has thought of the same ideas?
The characters are likeable, with backstories that make them more complex… but we get told those backstories in a rush of conversation that seems unnatural, as if the author wanted to get it over with. The same is true of major changes: they seem to happen in a rush of conversation that just doesn’t feel right.
The two main characters are clearly meant to be relatable geeks, but end up feeling like they’re pandering (for example, Jason’s interest in cat girls due to unnamed anime, or their bickering over how to name things). They swear a lot, seemingly as punctuation more than to make a point. There are several female characters in the book as well, but all the ones who get more than a passing mention are treated like their main purpose is to be sexual creatures – you get to hear, in detail and repeatedly, about their faces and bodies. The book does make an effort to show you that they are real people with personalities and backstories, but it feels like an afterthought – especially when you realize that the few times they start arguments that they win, it’s to convince the men to start a relationship, or persuade them that polygamy is a good idea. There’s just a little too much wish fulfillment going on.
All in all, it feels like a good first try, but one that’s very rough around the edges. I don’t feel like I can recommend it to my friends. I enjoyed some of it, but also regretted a lot of it.